Looking for the 'perfect' spouse?

Don't find the right mate - be the right mate

"All couples have about 10 irreconcilable issues. ... Switch partners and there are 10 new issues."

SUSAN SCHWARTZ

The Gazette

Monday, April 04, 2005

Couples in long marriages intrigue me. I find myself wondering how much of what brought them together helps them to stay together. I wonder sometimes how many of these lasting unions are driven by inertia - a cynical view, I know. But I wonder more what seems to inoculate some marriages against divorce - and not others.

Jane Brody, author of a long-running personal health column in the New York Times, once observed that asking long-married couples why their marriages have endured is like asking 10 blind people to describe an elephant: Answers vary widely.

In some way, though, they almost always reflect a mutual commitment and concern, love and respect. If too many couples believe the secret of a happy marriage lies in finding the right mate - and then, when trouble comes, they assume it's because they chose badly so they bolt - the ones in lasting marriages seem to have learned the secret is in being the right mate. It's in weathering tough times, in being flexible, in learning to accept the shortcomings of the other.

"It's the overriding commitment to the commitment," says Robyn Parker, an Australian researcher and author of a 2002 report called Why Marriages Last.

All couples have about 10 irreconcilable issues with each other, says Diane Sollee, a Washington, D.C.-based marriage and family therapist. Switch partners and there are 10 new issues. It's not differences that distinguish successful marriages, but how people handle them. Disagreement and fighting aren't predictors of divorce, she says: Contempt, criticism and the silent treatment, though, are.

Francine Klagsbrun, author of Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce, observed how the one thing people learn well in marriages is to hurt the other - how, always, at the height of an argument, one has one's finger on the weak spots of the other. "In lasting marriages," she wrote, "even in moments of sheer hatred, an alarm sounds and you hold back from saying the very thing the other most dreads hearing."

Sollee, founder and director of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education (www.smartmarriages.com), believes love is not an absolute but a feeling that ebbs and flows, depending on how people treat each other. She says satisfaction in a marriage often drops with the birth of a baby, that it's at its lowest when kids are between 11 and 16 and that it rises with the emptying of the nest.

It's the final stage of marriage - the last third - that's the real honeymoon period, she says.

And a new Canadian study bears this out. Older people generally rate the quality of their relationship as high, according to a report in the current issue of the StatsCan publication Canadian Social Trends. And the older they are, the more likely men and women are to feel positive about their relationship.

Anne Milan, an analyst with Canadian Social Trends, and Lee Chalmers, an associate professor at the University of New Brunswick, used data from the Statistics Canada General Social Surveys of 2001 and 1995 to examine the perceptions of 6,500 respondents age 50 to 74 concerning their relationship in retirement or in the time leading up to it. The scale used to measure relationship quality combined nine indicators, from frequency of laughing together to frequency of arguments about chores.

All things being equal, couples reported being happier together when both were retired than when they were in the labour force or one was retired.

One wrinkle, though: Couples who had adult children at home rated the quality of their marriage lower than those who didn't. And the more children at home, the lower the quality.

As the authors observe, an increasingly unstable job market for young people in this country has meant more couples approaching retirement or already retired are facing the challenges of a nest re-filled with children - boomerang children, behavioural scientists call them - they thought they'd launched.

That's not to say parents can't live happily with their adult children, say Chalmers and Milan. But there is research to show that when the reason kids are back home is rooted in a problem like unemployment and accompanied by economic dependency, it's more likely to interfere with their parents' marriage.

You don't, after all, want kids on your honeymoon, do you?

© The Gazette (Montreal) 2005